THE SIMPSON TRIAL: THE OVERVIEW Verdict Is Reached in Simpson's Trial; Ito Defers Announcement Until Today; Jurors Are Out for Less Than Four Hours

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With three telltale buzzes, jurors in the O. J. Simpson case announced this afternoon that they had reached a verdict, which was then handed to Judge Lance A. Ito in a sealed manila envelope. But Judge Ito said he would wait until Tuesday morning to open it and announce the results.

After deliberating for less than four hours -- and devoting a quarter of that time to a re-reading of testimony from a limousine driver -- the jury of 10 women and 2 men signaled their verdict, then filed back into Judge Ito's courtroom. The room was half empty, with none of the relatives of Nicole Brown Simpson or Ronald L. Goldman present, and only one defense lawyer, Carl Douglas, at Mr. Simpson's side.

Interviewed at his office, another of Mr. Simpson's lawyers, Robert L. Shapiro, pleaded for calm. "My hope always was that this jury would reach a verdict, and for that I'm thankful," Mr. Shapiro said. "On June 17, I made a plea to one man to surrender," referring to Mr. Simpson, the fugitive in a white Ford Bronco last year. "Today I make a plea to all Americans to remain calm, regardless of what the verdict is. Vocal dissent is always appropriate, but anything beyond that is not."

Mr. Shapiro would not predict what the verdict would be. But the sole defense lawyer whom he called when word emerged of the jury having reached a decision was Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who would almost certainly handle any appeal.

As he returned to Los Angeles today from San Francisco, Mr. Simpson's chief lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., said: "I'm not going to speculate. I'll wait until tomorrow and find out." Privately, another defense lawyer, who asked for anonymity, did speculate, suggesting that jurors had heard enough of the limousine driver's testimony to reach a reasonable doubt and that they were ready to acquit.

After the jury returned, Judge Ito said about the notification his law clerk gave him: "Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Robertson advised me that you buzzed three times and indicated that you have reached a verdict in this case. Is that correct, Madam Foreman?"

The foreman, a 50-year-old black woman sitting in seat No. 1 in the jury box, indicated yes, that she had signed and dated the verdict form, and placed it in a sealed envelope. But she admitted sheepishly that it had been left in the jury room.

"That's not a very good place for it," Judge Ito told her, smiling.

Accompanied by a bailiff, the woman went back to retrieve the envelope. She then handed it to the bailiff, who handed it to Judge Ito. He had previously promised the lawyers on both sides that he would give them four hours' notice before announcing any verdict, ostensibly to afford them time to converge from various points in this sprawling city. Since court normally adjourns at 5 P.M., that put the reading of the verdict over until the morning -- 10 A.M. Pacific time.

Judge Ito said his clerk would keep the envelope overnight return it to the foreman when court reconvenes. If she finds everything in it to be in order, she will then divulge its contents. The judge, obviously as flustered as everyone else by the astonishing turn of events, bade the jurors a "last pleasant, weekend -- uh, evening" before dismissing them.

Given the length of the trial, the shear volume of the evidence and the polarizing passions that the case has generated, it seemed astonishing that either conviction or acquittal could have been reached so quickly. Neither Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark nor Mr. Cochran was even present for it. Another prosecutor, Christopher A. Darden, who was in court today, had played down the significance of the readback and the request for the verdict forms only moments earlier.

"I think I have to believe it," Mr. Darden said at the rapid end of the deliberations. "It's happening. Nothing shocks me anymore."

On this, at least, Mr. Douglas agreed. "Surprise doesn't begin to describe my feelings," he said after court. "I'm stunned at the speed."

There was no way of knowing what the envelope holds, but some signs are ominous for Mr. Simpson. He could be convicted of either first- or second-degree murder, or both; jail terms range from 15 years, with the possibility of parole, to life imprisonment without it.

There was, to begin with, the nature and extent of the testimony the jurors wanted to review. It dealt not with the former Detective Mark Fuhrman or with what the defense claimed was unreliable scientific evidence pointing to Mr. Simpson, but to the guts of the prosecution's case: its timeline. That came from Allan Park, the limousine driver who was sent to fetch Mr. Simpson on the night of June 12, 1994, when Mrs. Simpson and Mr. Goldman were stabbed to death two miles and a five-minute drive away.

The testimony of Mr. Park, who drove Mr. Simpson to Los Angeles International Airport, fortified three cornerstones in the prosecution's case: that Mr. Simpson had ample time to murder two people, then return to his home; that neither Mr. Simpson nor his Bronco was at 360 North Rockingham when Mr. Park arrived at 10:22 P.M. (he first saw Mr. Simpson nearly 40 minutes later, and never saw the Bronco); and that the thumps on the wall that Brian (Kato) Kaelin heard sounded later than the defense maintains, shortly before Mr. Park saw Mr. Simpson emerge from his home.

The more encouraging interpretation for the defense is that by testifying that he saw Mr. Kaelin while speaking to his boss between 10:52 P.M. and 10:55 P.M., Mr. Park effectively pushed back the occurrence of those thumps by several minutes, to a time when Mr. Simpson could not have made them and also been at the crime scene. But in a note to Judge Ito, the jurors suggested that they had already heard their fill of Mr. Park before he made that point.

Jurors cut off his recitation before his account of seeing a large black man entering Mr. Simpson's home at 10:55 P.M. Mr. Park had testified that approximately six minutes later, he had seen the defendant appear, saying he had overslept. Nor did the jurors ask to hear Mr. Park's comments about Mr. Simpson's puzzling demeanor -- for instance, his complaints of how "hot" he felt in the air-conditioned limousine.

And they weren't at all interested in Mr. Cochran's cross-examination of Mr. Park, whether because by the time they walked into Judge Ito's courtroom this morning, they no longer needed to hear anything exculpatory or because what Mr. Park had said crystallized their reasonable doubt. Instead, they asked for a verdict form.

"My gut is that it's a conviction, but I almost don't want to believe it because it's so contrary to what all the common lore has been," said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "The fact that they didn't want to hear the defense's cross meant they just wanted to know if O. J. was at home at the time of the murders. Once they heard he wasn't, maybe that gave them the answer."

As a precautionary measure, the Los Angeles Police Department today was placed on a "modified tactical alert," its lowest level of alert, with the likelihood that it would be placed on full alert in the morning, said a department spokesman, Officer Eduardo Funes. The full alert will mean that nightshift officers will be held over when their duty ends, almost doubling the number on duty in the morning.

But Officer Funes added, "We do not foresee, do not expect, do not anticipate, we have no knowledge of any rallies or marches or anything that might mean trouble. These are all preparatory measures only."

As further precautions, he said, the city's Emergency Operations Center has also been activated, with a skeleton staff, and the street in front of the downtown Criminal Courts Building has been closed to traffic since Friday.

For many people, there was a sense of relief on this balmy night that the yearlong drama was almost over, and a feeling of resignation that the jurors' speed might mean that they had found O. J. Simpson guilty. Many said they did not really believe there would be violence if there was a guilty verdict.

"'m not so worried about rioting really," said Susan Lewis, a finance manager for a downtown homeless shelter. "Because the difference between this and Rodney King is nobody knows what happened. Whereas, with Rodney King it was clearly a miscarriage of justice and it was evil, and it was evil they, the people who ended up rioting live with everyday."

"With O. J. it doesn't seem like people agree," said Ms. Lewis, who was sitting with her daughter, Brianna, at a hamburger stand in Central Los Angeles. "So I don't think there will be rioting because there isn't that racial indignity underneath."

The police preparations reflect the lessons learned in April 1992 when the city was caught unprepared by the rioting that erupted after four police officers were acquitted of assault charges in the beating of Rodney G. King. Since then, the department has instituted similar or more extensive preparatory measures in the hours before the announcements of verdicts in other controversial cases.

Few of the jurors looked at Mr. Simpson as their announcement was made this afternoon. Mr. Simpson himself appeared stunned, blinking his eyes and appearing slightly breathless. He dropped a pen and stared at the jurors as they filed out of court -- so intently, in fact, that a bailiff had to nudge him gently on the shoulder as his time, too, came to leave.

There were other ominous augeries for Mr. Simpson today. One was the choice -- made Friday but announced today -- of a foreman, a thoughtful and disciplined woman who, defense lawyers feared, would be less susceptible to their emotional appeals. She took in Mr. Park's testimony this morning in her customary pose: head on hands like Rodin's "Thinker," her back to fellow jurors, listening studiously.

Jurors -- dressed largely in casual clothes -- arrived in the deliberation room off Judge Ito's chambers at 9:16 this morning, and began their discussions half an hour later. Within two hours, they had asked to hear Mr. Park's testimony. And after lunch they did, for roughly 55 minutes. Mr. Simpson sat nearby, chatting amiably with Mr. Douglas and following along on a computer.

The panelists once more heard Mr. Park's account of arriving at Mr. Simpson's largely darkened home, where he buzzed several times for his client, all to no avail. This time the testimony was read in a dull monotone by a court reporter rather than being spoken confidently as it was late last March by Mr. Park himself, a clean-cut young man in a starched white shirt.

More apparent in this reading was how calculatedly redundant that testimony was, with Ms. Clark tracing and retracing every move that Mr. Park and his stretch limousine made that night as he drove up and down Rockingham Avenue and Ashford Street. Unlike so much timeline testimony in the case, his remarks were backed by cellular phone records, made as he nervously called his boss and his mother about his famous but missing celebrity passenger.

"This was a witness who was absolutely neutral, absolutely neutral," Ms. Clark had told jurors last week in her closing argument. "He was not going to strain to avoid answers. He was not going to make any effort to embellish anything. This was a witness who was just going to tell it straight and tell it honest all the way through, no matter who was asking the questions."

The jurors, listening today, displayed the usual vocabulary of emotions: A 37-year-old black woman in the front row looked grave; the black man to her left fought off fatigue, rubbing his eyes when they weren't darting around the courtroom; the elderly black woman took notes, though she had heard it all before. Then again, she also took notes last week when Mrs. Simpson could be heard screaming on tape.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: THE SIMPSON TRIAL: THE OVERVIEW Verdict Is Reached in Simpson's Trial; Ito Defers Announcement Until Today; Jurors Are Out for Less Than Four Hours. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe